The Montana team held local Making Connections workshops, with 14 mathematicians, educators, and school teachers, at the Montana Learning Center at Canyon Ferry, on September 28, 2006 and January 25, 2007, using these problems.
From Jenny McNulty: 'We had our second (and final) meeting of middle school, high school and university teachers. Each group gave a set of algebra problems to their class and brought "interesting" solutions with them. We had some great discussions about the solutions and how we teach mathematics. It was amazing to me to see that in many cases the 7th graders had far superior solutions to the other groups. There were some very good solutions and some very disturbing ones. We discussed a variety of issues. For example, one solution stated "do parentheses first" but the student didn't know exactly what that meant, so we discussed alternatives to this phrase "do parentheses first"-maybe "take care of parentheses" and discuss what that means.'
